Friday, February 3, 2017

About the Meaning of Life, part 3: Regeneration

I suppose folk are often frustrated by all this metaphysical stuff... this detailed thinking... based in inward experience, about the nature of life.

One wonders what use it may be.

The difficulty here is that we human beings fail to see the significance of life until it's too late. Having put my mother in home for the elderly, and seeing the consequences that inevitably flow within Being (developed or undeveloped, no matter) towards the end of life—myself reaching already the age of 61—I see that only God matters. That is to say, all outer things eventually become worthless. One will die; and this fact ultimately eclipses all the possible material actions one may complete. It is, of course, possible to live right out to the very end of the thread focused on the outer; yet generally speaking, unless one's spiritual capacities have been irrevocably damaged, one sees that this simply isn't enough. One is left alone, as life goes on, with Being. It is the state of one's Being, over the long trajectory, that determines the value of life: and within the value is embedded all the meaning.

The death of loved ones helps to bring one into closer contact with this Truth; and death may serve in this way as the greatest educator. In Medieval times that was much better understood than it is now; the vanities of technology and medicine insulate us, through imagination, from our inevitable end. In an exquisite irony that very same end, viewed as it so often is through the cold and narrow lenses of those same forces, looks far less human than it ought. No one, after all, grows up hoping they'll die under florescent lights, surrounded by machines; yet so many of us do.

If we don't develop a solid, an intimate, relationship with Being to serve inwardly over the course of a lifetime, we fail to muster the inner resources needed to impart an overarching and final value to our lives. That value ought, for every human, to be an unceasing effort to open the heart and soul to God so that He can flow inwardly into us and help effect a Divine transformation and regeneration of our spiritual nature; a secret, sacred, and intimate transformation.

In this sense, even throwing away the philosophical and metaphysical explanations and arguments, one needs to grapple in practical ways with the understanding that everything turns to dust.

Life can't be poured from concrete or hammered out of metal; it can't be rendered in CGI. The achievements of the soul, such as they are, are the only durable substance we can take with us through life and into death.

Everything short of life itself—Being itself, lived inwardly—is thus a misrepresentation that lawfully mirrors that same misrepresentation that begets the fallen nature of material reality. Gurdjieff's organic, instinctive shame is thus not just a human condition, but a universal one—as he indeed explains in Beelzebub's Tales.

This is no coincidence; think on it. We reflect not just our own nature, but the nature of the cosmos; all the lessons we need to know what we are lie precisely in the nature of what we are, if understood correctly.Hosanna.

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Recommendations and current reading list

Lee's current reading list (all recommended)

The Iceberg- Marion Coutts. This extraordinary book deserves to be read by every individual engaged in an inner search. The questions it raises about life, death, and relationship are framed by the authors responsibilities to her very young child and her dying husband. This is a book about real work in life, not esoteric theory.

Far From The Tree: Andrew Solomon. Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Highly recommended.

Inner Yoga, Sri Anirvan—This extraordinary book is essential reading for any serious student of Gurdjieff or Yoga practice. Written at a level of both practical and philosophical discourse well above other contemporary work, Anirvan investigates the deep roots of Yoga practice, theory, and philosophy in a deeply sensitive series of insights. Of particular interest is the extraordinary and challenging piece on Buddhi and Buddhiyoga, which examines the questions of practice, life, and death with an acuity rarely encountered in other work of this nature.

Divine Love and Wisdom, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg gives us a detailed report on Reality as received from higher sources, reflecting many Truths one would be wise to study carefully. Readers will be astounded by the extraordinary degree of correlation between Swedenborg and Ibn 'Arabi. Many fundamental principles introduced by Gurdjieff are also expounded on in fascinating detail by Swedenborg. All of Swedenborg's works are well worth reading.

The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, Ibn 'Arabi. Another real gem, this book ought to be read by every seeker on the spiritual path. If you can only find the time to read one book by Ibn 'Arabi, this ought to be the one. By turns lighthearted, serious, insightful, and ingenius, al 'Arabi introduces us to our inner government character by character, explains their relationships, and indicates how to bring them into a state of harmonious cooperation. Written with love, the book deftly manages to avoid being didactic, delivering instead a sensitive, poetic, and even romantic look at how to organize our inner Being.

The Bezels of Wisdom—Ibn al 'Arabi. A compendium of observations about the nature of "The Reality"—what al 'Arabi calls God— from a 13th century Sufi master. This towering work easily holds its own against—and is worthy of comparison to—13th century masterpieces from other major religious traditions such as Dogen's Shobogenzo and Meister Eckhart's sermons.